New York Times Launches Social Media Ad Program

News media outlets are increasingly realizing that online readers are finding their websites’ content through people sharing stories on social media.

Finding a way to sell advertising against those readers has been a challenge.

The New York Times Co. unveiled Thursday a new social-media advertising program that attempts to address that quandary. Called Ricochet, the program lets marketers pick a select number of stories from Times Co. properties, such as the Times or Boston Globe, that are relevant to their social media audiences and create special links for sharing those stories. Anyone clicking on the social media links will see the marketer’s ads next to the stories for a specified period of time.

To keep a dividing line between editorial and advertising, advertisers won’t be able to pick stories that mention their brands for at least a week after the stories have run.

The program’s launch client is SAP, the business software company, which is picking Times stories about topics like big data and cloud computing. It will share these stories with its 127,000 Facebook friends, 47,000 Twitter followers, 113,000 LinkedIn followers and 2,000 YouTube followers. Anyone of those people clicking on the stories will see ads from a new SAP ad campaign that rolled out last week.

The program reflects Times Co’s realization about how its content is flowing through Twitter. It found that much of its content was being shared by companies which use social media as a way of connecting with consumers.

“As we watched how brands were using social media, we thought, could we bring them a product that could bring them more value for doing that?,” said Michael Zimbalist, the vice president of research & development operations at the Times Co.

This trend is part of a broader change in marketers’ roles in the digital age. “Brands are increasingly becoming publishers in their own right, and that has been developing over the past five years,” said Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst and author of “Newsonomics: Twelve Trends that Will Shape The News You Get.” “It used to be ‘buy our product.’ Increasingly, it’s ‘come to our site and have an experience.’”

One problem is that because many advertisers are not traditional content producers, they can struggle to find compelling ways to communicate. Linking to other media outlets solves that problem.

“Obviously, what you try to do when you are running your own social media channels is to provide a unique experience that folks aren’t getting somewhere else,” said Susan Popper, senior vice president of integrated marketing communications at SAP. “We saw this as a way to do that.”

The blurring of the traditional roles of advertiser and media outlet does raise some questions about how the barrier between editorial and advertising will be protected, Mr. Doctor said.

“Someone may raise the question of, well, are they going to start producing content that brands really like? If brands really like producing content about energy, and they are making a lot of money off it, is the newsroom going to be more likely to produce more energy content because it pleases the brands?” he said.

Mr. Zimbalist emphasized that the Times Co. has put editorial guidelines in place to protect the journalism’s independence. Aside from the seven-day delay on sharing stories about themselves, advertisers won’t be able to share negative stories about their competitors.